The massive 416 mm² large chip contains no less than 2263 million transistors. Each generation of Intel and AMD server CPUs seem to get a bit larger as you can see below.

The Xeon 5400, 5500/5600 and E5-2600 package on top, the Opteron 2300/8300 and 6100/6200 below.

So how does the new Xeon compare to the older Xeons and the latest Opterons? Let's take a look at the paper specs:

Xeon E5-2600
"Sandy Bridge EP"

Opteron 6200
"Interlagos"

Opteron 6100
"Magny-cours"

Xeon 5600
"Westmere"

Cores (Modules)/Threads

8/16

8/16

12/12

6/12

L1Instruction

8x 32 KB 4-way

8x 64 KB 2-way

12x 64 KB 2-way

6x 32 KB 4-way

L1Data

8x 32 KB 8-way

16x 16 KB 4-way

12x 64 KB 2-way

6x 32 KB 8-way

L2 Cache

8x 256 KB

4x 2MB

12x 0.5MB

6x 256 KB

L3 Cache

20 MB

2x 8MB

2x 6MB

12MB

Max. Memory Bandwidth
(Per socket)

51.2 GB/s

51.2 GB/s

42.6 GB/s

32 GB/s

IMC Clock Speed

= corespeed

2GHz

1.8GHz

2GHz

Interconnect

2x QPI 2.0 (8 GT/s)

4x HT 3.1 (6.4 GT/s)

4x HT 3.1 (6.4 GT/s)

2x QPI (4.8-6.4 GT/s)

Transistors (Billion)

2,26

2x 1,2

2x 904

1,17

Die Size (mm²)

416

2x 315

2x 346

248

The new Xeon comes with a huge die, and with its ring interconnect and improved RAS, it starts to look more like a successor of the Westmere-EX than the Westmere-EP Xeon. In fact the ring of the Xeon E5 is more advanced: it has a PCIe agent, PCU and IMC on the same ring as the 8 cores.

The massive die, the two extra cores, the integration of the PCIe controller and no competition in the high-end have made it easier for Intel to justify a price increase. The Sandy Bridge EP is somewhat more expensive than its predecessor, as you can see in the table below. The first clockspeed mentioned is the regular clock, the second the turbo clock with all cores active (most realistic one) and the last the maximum turbo clock.

Intel new vs. Intel 2-socket SKU Comparison

Xeon
5600

Cores/
Threads

TDP

Clock
(GHz)

Price

Xeon
E-5

Cores/
Threads

TDP

Clock
(GHz)

Price

High Performance

High Performance

2690

8/16

135W

2.9/3.3/3.8

$2057

X5690

6/12

130W

3.46/3.6/3.73

$1663

2680

8/16

130W

2.7/3.1/3.5

$1723

2670

8/16

115W

2.6/3/3.3

$1552

2665

8/16

115W

2.4/2.8/3.1

$1440

X5675

6/12

95W

3.06/3.33/3.46

$1440

X5660

6/12

95W

2.8/3.06/3.2

$1219

2660

8/16

95W

2.2/2.6/3.0

$1329

X5650

6/12

95W

2.66/2.93/3.06

$996

2650

8/16

95W

2/2.4/2.8

$1107

Midrange

Midrange

E5649

6/12

80W

2.53/2.66/2.8

$774

2640

6/12

95W

2.5/2.5/3

$885

2630

6/12

95W

2.3/2.3/2.8

$612

E5645

6/12

80W

2.4/2.53/2.66

$551

2620

6/12

95W

2/2/2.5

$406

E5620

4/8

80W

2.4/2.53/2.66

$387

High clock / budget

High clock / budget

X5647

4/8

130W

2.93/3.06/3.2

$774

2643

4/8

130W

3.3/3.3/3.5

$885

E5630

4/8

80W

2.53/2.66/2.8

$551

E5607

4/4

80W

2.26

$276

2609

4/4

80W

2.4

$294

Power Optimized

Power Optimized

L5640

6/12

60W

2.26/2.4/2.66

$996

2650L

8/16

70W

1.8/2/2.3

$1107

5630

4/8

40W

2.13/2.26/2.4

$551

2630L

8/16

60W

2/2/2.5

$662

The Xeon E5-2690's somewhat out of the ordinary TDP (135W) is easy to explain. With a very small TDP increase (+5W) Intel's engineers noticed they could raise the clock of the best SKU with another 200 MHz from 2.7 GHz (130W) to 2.9 GHz. The E5-2690 was more or less a safeguard in the event that the Interlagos Opteron turned out to be a real "Bulldozer". As the Opteron could not meet these expectations, the high performance of the 135W chip allows Intel to ask more than $2000 for its best Xeon EP. Which is quite a bit more than what the best Xeon EP used to sell for so far ($1500-1600).

Since the new Xeon has two extra cores and integrates the I/O hub (IOH), it is understandable that the TDP values are a bit higher compared to the older Xeon.

How does these new Xeon SKUs compare to the Opteron? See below.

AMD vs. Intel 2-socket SKU Comparison

Xeon
E5

Cores/
Threads

TDP

Clock
(GHz)

Price

Opteron

Modules/
Integer
cores

TDP

Clock
(GHz)

Price

High Performance

High Performance

2665

8/16

115W

2.4/2.8/3.1

$1440

2650

8/16

95W

2/2.4/2.8

$1107

6282 SE

8/16

140W

2.6/3.0/3.3

$1019

Midrange

Midrange

2640

6/12

95W

2.5/2.5/3

$885

6276

8/16

115W

2.3/2.6/3.2

$788

2630

6/12

95W

2.3/2.3/2.8

$639

6274

8/16

115W

2.2/2.5/3.1

$639

6272

8/16

115W

2.0/2.4/3.0

$523

2620

6/12

95W

2/2/2.5

$406

6238

6/12

115W

2.6/2.9/3.2

$455

6234

6/12

115W

2.4/2.7/3.0

$377

High clock / budget

High clock / budget

2643

4/8

130W

3.3/3.3/3.5

$885

6220

4/8

115W

3.0/3.3/3.6

$455

2609

4/4

80W

2.4

$294

6212

4/8

115W

2.6/2.9/3.2

$266

Power Optimized

Power Optimized

2630L

8/16

60W

2/2/2.5

$662

6262HE

8/16

85W

1.6/2.1/2.9

$523

Let's start with the midrange first, as the competition is the fiercest there and these SKUs are among the most popular on the market. Based on the paper specs, AMD's 6276, 6274 and Intel's 2640 and 2630 are in a neck-and-neck race. AMD offers 16 smaller integer clusters, while Intel offers 6 or 8 heavy, slightly higher clocked cores with SMT. And while we did not receive a Xeon E5-2630 for benchmarking purposes, we were able to quickly simulate one by disabling the 2 cores of our Xeon 2660, which gave us a six-core processor at 2.2 GHz with 20 MB L3-cache. This pseudo-2660 should perform very similar to the real Xeon 2630, which is clocked 4.5% higher, but has 5 MB less L3-cache.

Meanwhile in the high performance segment we'll be comparing our six-core 2660 with the Opteron 6276. The CPUs in this comparison aren't going to be in the same price bracket, but as the AMD platform is typically a bit cheaper the 2660 and the Opteron 6276 end up having similar total platform costs. Otherwise for a more straightforward comparison based solely on CPU prices the 2660's closest competitor would be the Opteron 6274. We don't have one of those on hand, but you can get a pretty good idea of how that would compare by knocking 4% off of the performance of the 6276..

Finally, for the "Power Optimized" market there seems to be little contest over who is going to win there. Intel's chip is a bit more expensive, but it offers a much lower TDP, just as many threads, and a higher clockspeed. Considering that the Intel chip also integrates the PCIe controller, it looks like Intel will have no trouble winning this battle by a landslide. Fortunately for AMD, this review is mostly about the more popular midrange market.

'The Opteron might also have a role in the low end, price sensitive HPC market, where it still performs very well. It won't have much of chance in the high end clustered one as Intel has the faster and more power efficient PCIe interface'

Well, if that's the case, why exactly would AMD be scoring so many design wins with Interlagos. Including this one ...

U think those guys at Cray were going for low performance ? In fact, seems like AMD has being rather cleaning up in the HPC market since the arrival of Interlagos. And the markets have picked up on it, AMD stock is thru the roof since the start of the year. Or just see how many Intel processors occupy the the top 10 supercomputers on the planet. Nuff said ...Reply

65 nm is still used for Itanium, though the Poulson chip is due sometime this year made on a 32 nm process. If you want to compare die sizes, the 65 nm Tukwila design is 699 mm^2 in size.

The main reason why 32 nm Sandybridge-E has been released so close to the release of 22 nm Ivy Bridge chips is that the initial Ivy Bridge chips are consumer centric. Intel performs additional testing on its server centric designs. This is particularly true as Sandybridge-E is not just replacing the dual socket Westmere-EP chips but some of the quad socket Westmere-EX market. RAS demands jump from going from dual to quad socket and that is reflected in additional testing. Implementing PCI-E 3.0 and QPI 1.1 also contributed to the time for additional testing.

Though you are correct that Intel does uses its older process nodes for various chipsets and IO chips. However, as Intel is marching toward SoC designs, the actual utility of keeping these older process nodes in action is decreasing. Reply

More than that though, the SNB-E, Xeon E cores are not duplicates of the SNB desktop cores.

Look at Anand's die shot of SNB-E, vs die shot of SNB. The CPU cores, L3 cache, controllers, are arranged completely different. Which makes sense as SNB-E doesn't have to deal with 40% of the die being GPU transistors. So, what we have now with Intel is two completely different dies between Xeon/SNB-E and Core. The individual CPU cores are the same, but the rest of the die is completely different.